Lancaster daily intelligencer. [volume] (Lancaster, Pa.) 1864-1928, 1887-04-30

on THE WAY TO BLACKwELLs ISLAND.
clumsy stumbling herd of what are called
drunk and disorderlies." The steamboat is
going to all the official islands up the East
river--to Blackwell's, Wards and Randall's
islands, where are the hospitals, mad-houses.
alms-houses and pcnitentiary. Consequently
unfortunatcs destined for all these places are
among her passengers. Fitting about among
ali the Others on the boat and on the wharf
are several women in clean, neat suits ot
what We all know a. "bed-tiCk." Some arr
of repulsive aspect, with battered and bruised
faces, but here and there one sees IA healthy,
rosy, pretty one. To one of these little
Martha York is handel, and she takes the
foundling on board the steamer and feeds il
with bottle.
These women in suits Of betl-ticking are
what are called 'ten-day prisoners" They
are abandoned women arrested for walk
ing the streets, drunken and quarrelsome
wives from the tenements, and vagrants.
This, then, is the introduction of one of the
city's wards to its new career-iandled by a
couresan from the lowest depths and by her
taken into the thick of a crowded boat-load
of thieves, pickpoc kets, paupers and bad
women, and among the blind the halt, the dis
eased and the mad, All! this is shocking
cruelty, the very refinement of outrage and
yet the little innocent knows naught of its
environments, but looks on with wondering
eyes, happy II 1t but escapes pain,
1t is taken to the last landing the boat
makes, the Infant Asylum on Randalps 5
lsland--a great well-lighted, scrupulously
clean three-stOry brick building with an av-
erage census" of $50 fnundlings coming and
dying daily, mainly the latter Some paid
nurses move about the wards superintending
the women who nurse the foundlings The
poor little waif has not escaped the guardian
shin Of vice and crime and will not while
the great heartless city is its guardian. The
nurses are the same bad women, paupers and
convalescent invalids We saw on the boat
The best of them are apt to be self-commit-
ted paulers with babies of their own The
Others are fallen women Just out of the lying
IN hospital and pauper women who have
gone to the hospital In the same condition
II has been found that they treat the help
less little waits Of the streets very unfairly,
nursing their own babies and starving the
Others IL they are not watched. But they
are watched and the best care the humane
paid nurses can exact for the little ones is
given To them The great majority die and
are buried in startlingly plain and unhal-
lowed-looking pit In tiers and rows, foot to
head in lines and on top of one another in
the other direction. The little coffins are
numbered and by the records that are kept
any founding can be traced from where It's
mother abandoned it to its coffin, but no
need for this was ever known. No mother
ever yet has called for the corpse of her little
one.
II is not because of their treatment in the
city's hands that the homeless babies die.
II Is because Of their exposure after their
mothers leave them, because their mothers
drug them, because they are born in misery
and poverty, because they are apt to have
been half starved. Once in while the pub
lie catch mother In the act Of surrendering
her child to the cold world. That is felony